Ericsson boosting performance in radio, cloud

DUBAI, April 29, 2015

Ericsson Networks Software 15B delivers many new capabilities in the areas of radio access, cloud and virtualization, as well as in the network management and control domain, said a top official.

Upon introduction, the new Ericsson Radio System will also operate with Networks Software 15B, added Sue Rudd, director Service Provider Analysis, Strategy Analytics.

"Ericsson Networks Software 15B offers end user and operator benefits from radio access to IP core and into the cloud that improve capacity, lower costs and simplify operations. These new capabilities provide substantial incentives for operators to upgrade,” said Rudd.

Håkan Djuphammar, vice president, Head of Technology, Business Unit Cloud & IP at Ericsson, said: “We are delivering System Software releases in coherent software packages, synchronized and tested across nodes in networks, end to end, to maximize performance and efficiency. In between these releases we can deliver separate SW releases with dedicated functionality thanks to our agile software development and release methodology.”

“This allows us to continuously deliver new software functions that enable our customers to capture new opportunities of the networked society while operating in an efficient manner.”

Networks Software 15B highlights include the world’s first software-only upgrade of the installed base of LTE digital units, and software for new deployments to enable simultaneous LTE TDD-FDD operation.

Concurrent TDD and FDD operation on the same software and hardware reduces capital and operational expenditures. Common hardware and software also efficiently enables TDD-FDD Carrier Aggregation which improves the TDD application coverage area by up to 200 per cent.

Ericsson is also leading the way in cloud and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) transformation, said Djuphammar.

In order to ensure that the NFV vision is realized, Ericsson is a committed driver of the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) project, he added.

In the Networks Software 15B release Ericsson is improving throughput and availability in the Cloud Execution Environment needed to meet the high requirements telecom applications have on infrastructure.

Personalized Wi-Fi calling and dynamic control of LTE handover is ensured by the Service Aware Policy Controller.

The introduction of Ericsson Virtual Router provides the industry’s first carrier-grade IP routing system, offering agility in service and infrastructure deployment based on a truly modular architecture. It offers redundancy and scaling that is 20 times higher than its nearest competitor.

Ericsson is also unifying and simplifying the task of network management across LTE and EPC, shortening the time-to-market for LTE roll-out, with automated handling of up to 60,000 LTE cells.

LTE Psi is introduced to support the next wave of LTE coverage expansion more cost-effectively. LTE Psi is an Ericsson innovation that delivers full cell coverage by sharing a single radio across three antennas. This improves the energy efficiency of a full coverage LTE cell site by 40 per cent.

With WCDMA/HSPA projected to make up the majority of all subscriptions in 2020, Networks Software 15B also includes app coverage enhancements for mobile device users such as WCDMA Uplink Coordinated Multipoint, improving capacity by up to 20 per cent and Enhanced Uplink Low Latency Pre-Scheduling, which increases initial throughput by up to 40 per cent.

To accommodate the growth of machine-to-machine devices on GSM networks, the number of GSM device connections that can be supported has been doubled and Automated Neighbor Relations capabilities have been added to optimize communications between cells while reducing operating costs.